Viral e-mails didn’t really come into widespread use until early in the last decade, says David Emery, who tracks urban legends for About.com. The first big target was a Democrat: presidential candidate John Kerry, subjected to wild claims about his wealth, his service in Vietnam and the supposed radical connections of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Nonpartisan debunkers such as FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, PolitiFact.com, Emery and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker have been chasing down these tales and dousing them like three-alarm fires for years. (There’s even a chain e-mail that paints Snopes as a liberal cover-up for the White House.) It’s often difficult for these myth-busters to say with certainty where a falsehood began. But the numbers are clear.

Of the 79 chain e-mails about national politics deemed false by PolitiFact since 2007, only four were aimed at Republicans. Almost all of the rest concern Obama or other Democrats. The claims range from daffy (the White House renaming Christmas trees as “holiday trees”) to serious (the health-care law granting all illegal immigrants free care).

Snopes turned up 46 viral e-mails regarding Bush during his eight years in office. By contrast, in just four years as a candidate and as president, Obama has been the subject of 100 such chain e-mails. The difference is not just in number but in kind: Twenty of the 46 Bush e-mails checked by Snopes turned out to be true, and many of these flattered or praised him. Only 10 e-mails about Obama have been true, and almost every one of them has been negative.

Emery estimates that more than 80 percent of the political e-mails that he’s vetted over the past decade were written from a conservative point of view. “The use of forwarded e-mail to spread [false information] around is overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon,” he said.

It's always worth remembering that the last few decades have constituted massive political *change* in the US, rather than a continuation of behaviors that existed in the same way earlier. These kind of assertions just did not exist in anything like this quantity 30 years ago, and certainly not with the same vehemence.

There's no materials safety sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO", scrawled over and over again in charred blood. - Randall Munroe

Montana's chief federal judge said Wednesday that he forwarded an email that contained a joke involving bestiality and President Barack Obama's mother, but he did so because he dislikes the president and not because he's racist.

Even a conservative federal judge cannot help himself.

Cebull told the newspaper that his brother sent him the email, which he forwarded to six "old buddies" and acquaintances. He prefaced the email with the message: "Normally I don't send or forward a lot of these, but even by my standards, it was a bit touching. I want all of my friends to feel what I felt when I read this. Hope it touches your heart like it did mine."

I'm not sure how his defense of, "but I'm not racist," makes him look better.

"I suggest we imbibe copious amounts of alcohol and just wait for the inevitable blast wave." - Castiel

I'm not sure how his defense of, "but I'm not racist," makes him look better.

"I'm not a racist. I just act exactly like a racist would act."

Precisely. This is exactly how I generally respond when someone does or says something incredibly racist and then hides behind the whole "you don't know what's in my head/heart" bs. Racist is as racist does.

Funny how there's a crossover between people who dislike hate crime legislation because you "can't legislate what's in someone's heart" and people who claim they're not racist in their hearts, they just act like it.

Gravey wrote:

Reading Maq's post as anything but dry humour probably means you just need another cup of coffee.

Actually, I found his explanation that he found it funny because he hated Obama to be, well, real. I know a *lot* of people who happily have black friends and co-workers and even family members by marriage who would happily send this email around. I've seen worse from them, that's how I know.

The political divide is huge these days.

There's no materials safety sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO", scrawled over and over again in charred blood. - Randall Munroe

Actually, I found his explanation that he found it funny because he hated Obama to be, well, real. I know a *lot* of people who happily have black friends and co-workers and even family members by marriage who would happily send this email around. I've seen worse from them, that's how I know.

The political divide is huge these days.

I'm not sure I buy it though.

I have absolutely no respect for Herman Cain, but it would never occur to me to pass on an email joke that attacks his race or ethnicity. And I think to do so says a whole lot about the sort of person that would.

Actually, I found his explanation that he found it funny because he hated Obama to be, well, real. I know a *lot* of people who happily have black friends and co-workers and even family members by marriage who would happily send this email around. I've seen worse from them, that's how I know.

The political divide is huge these days.

I'm not sure I buy it though.

I have absolutely no respect for Herman Cain, but it would never occur to me to pass on an email joke that attacks his race or ethnicity. And I think to do so says a whole lot about the sort of person that would.

Agreed. I won't pretend I haven't found offensive jokes funny but I would never forward them on to people. In fact, something about the email format makes it more disturbing to me, I'm not sure why.

That's just it. They don't see it as racist because they believe that it's funny to mock him. That's the *point*, in their mind - he's not worthy of respect and the idea that his mother was "loose" would be the main point. People see what they want to in this stuff. (Sarcasm alert) How could people imagine they are *racist* just because the President is *black*? I mean, really!

None of these guys thinks they are "bad people".

There's no materials safety sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO", scrawled over and over again in charred blood. - Randall Munroe

Whether someone thinks of himself as a bad person has rarely ever been a meaningful metric for whether or not they are (or if their actions are racist). I'm certain that antebellum slave owners and their postbellum iterations the night riders saw themselves not so much as racists, but preservers of white rights.

Paleo, that's my *point*. I don't think this guy is a racist in his everyday life, because I see plenty of people who are *not* racists use racist terminology about Obama without even thinking about it. It's a weird double standard, but I'm betting the guy honestly described his position; he's more repulsed by people thinking he's a racist than he is about the idea that a Federal judge would even consider forwarding something like this. He doesn't get it.

There's no materials safety sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO", scrawled over and over again in charred blood. - Randall Munroe

I guess. I guess my point is that the entire discussion of whether or not the judge is a racist is not likely to be productive, but it is pretty clear that his act was very racist in nature. Whatever his deep seeded hatred for Obama, attacking him for his ethnicity says a whole lot about the judge's character that he would see it as somehow okay to commit a racist act.

As I quoted Lao Tzu above, actions make habits, habits make character, character determine's destiny.